


the atlantic

by samarqand



Category: Invaders (Marvel), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 19:37:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky called it a nightmare.  Toro called it a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the atlantic

But God, there was this horrible dream once.

Toro offers that word, "dream." He calls even the worst of them dreams, recalling a book he’d read with Jim Hammond on his mind: newfangled psychological theories on behavior. 

Toro would do this compulsively, read tough academic tomes just to reaffirm that Jim was human as he was: both of them inherently different from the rest, sure, but possessing the same important parts of the heart. 

The book on behaviorism said, picture free will as illusion. Visceral experiences accumulate and in time lock our mental structures. So what is a dream at all but reassurance that the only experiences that motivate us are the brutal basics: sex and death? Dreams are practice; dreams are mirrors; they are our roots uprooted and raw.

Toro couldn’t finish the book, and small wonder. He’d stolen some thoughtful glances over at Jim in the weeks following, during quiet hours at the listening stations in France, or over a rare treat of a dinner at Brian Falsworth’s manor, and reminded himself of the distance of dreams from all of this. He'd wanted Jim to always be smiling over the rim of his teacup, content and with so much left to discover in the world. He’d thought there was much more to invest in right here, with the laughter and tenuous strings of joy that knotted him and Jim, Steve, Brian, Bucky and yes, Namor and Nick and Izzy and Gabe and all the liberated continental towns and everyone they’d ever collided into, together. 

He thought of sex and death as mysterious inevitables, something that will happen to you when you are ready; but to try to tear through time’s seams and possess them presently was profane. 

He didn’t like to think of something in one’s own head as a nightmare. Nightmares were what people did to each other, on Europe and Asia’s blood-soaked soil, and on the train tracks some fuzzy night in years past when Toro was the nightmare.

It was just a horrible dream.

 

+

 

But the dream begs to be told. 

He speaks while knowing the story will come out wrong, the details already interred somewhere deep. 

They’re only blanketed impressions, suggestions by now. So he explains it, but it’s wrong. But he must try.

It went like this. (He says.)

There was water. Water, and a green little grassy slope overlooking it. Slide down the slope, you found yourself on the beach. The roiling sea had gone murky with rain’s runoff. 

Toro stood out on the rocks. They jutted out in a craggy dark expanse that gave into the waves. The rocks behind Toro grew into caves. If you’d read it enough times, your brain might’ve fashioned them into spacious, shadowy homes like you imagined Plato’s Cave to be -- the sort of caves where you could hide forever from the world, if you wanted.

(He settles for describing it this way:) they were caves you could get lost in, see, caves with chambers and all. Real caves. 

And Toro was struggling with himself; to hide inside a cave or to go out. It’s either the sea or the cave. To claim indecision in No Man’s Land amid the field of sharp coral striking from the frothing waters, to try to live on top of these bulwarks...

You needed to choose.

And Toro walked toward the sea.

Bucky watched from the safe sand.

A wave smashed against the rocks, and then another. The third wave charged in, raging, and crashed over Toro, snuffed out his light, swept him off the earth.

Bucky ran into a beach house and screamed until he remembered words. He begged for Cap and Jim. He begged for Namor’s ocean to spit Toro out. 

No one was home. So he wandered from room to room inside the house, anguished and searching for things he couldn’t name, because no one was there to listen.

Later, too late, he sat by Toro’s modestly sheeted body - a white towel blurred his outline where it sprawled lifeless on the sand. Steve and Jim stood over him and Toro, soberly discussing where Toro's corpse should be sent.

Bucky looked up at Steve and Jim from this long-forgotten angle, when the knees tell you who loves you, and he would now and then break into small, whimpering bouts of tears while he watched them. 

They would look down at him, tired, and then look up and talk some more. 

When he cried, he could make them finally go silent -- just for a moment.

“It’s a horrible dream, is all,” Toro whispers to him.

“I know that,” Bucky says, irate and eyes owlish with interrupted sleep, “I know that, you moron. Sure, I’m saying I got sand stuck to my feet.” He pauses and draws a leg up to feel his feet. The diluting adrenaline has eased his hunched shoulders, the gulping breaths he took for moments after waking up panicked. He seems to lie strangely in his own skin now, like those sturdy arms compensate for the way he searches Toro’s face from his bed.

Toro stands from where he’s kneeling beside Bucky's bed. “It’s a rotten dream,” he tries again, supportive. “But here’s how it’d really go. I’m not a bad swimmer at all -- I’d let that current take me anywheres, just wait it out, and then I’d just -- “ He dog-paddles in the air. 

Bucky shakes his head. He closes his eyes fitfully. “Cripes, what a nut,” he mutters. “Waking my own damn self up with...” He rubs at his face. “So much for our one quiet night.”

“Say,” Toro says, whispering theatrically loud now, “how about I make us tea?”

“Falsworth’s gotten to you,” Bucky says, remotely.

“Well -- look, we’ll find rum, or a moonshine’ll do, and you just top your tea off with -- “

“No,” Bucky says, and rolls over.

“Jeez.” Toro waits for a moment, and when his bare feet feel cold and displaced waiting on the floor for Bucky to come around, he crawls back into his own bed. He snuggles in, warm and worried, sleepy other things that his urgency-jolted mind can’t unravel. 

So he murmurs when he turns to face Bucky from his pillow, “You’re stuck with me, pal. A dream’s got no say in that.” He smiles.

Bucky doesn’t come around.

 

+

 

Morning, Bucky is gone before Toro is, off to explore this liberated little French town. The press, zooming on in to these uncharted, unbound territories, want pictures of the heroes in action. Steve Rogers will spend a good few hours rebuilding alongside Namor, Jim, and Jacqueline before they move on to the next recon point. 

Toro sits in front of a tarnished mirror in some forgotten bedroom and stares at his curls, how they tuck under his ear and spring unruly off his head, too long. 

He looks like a child. He doesn’t want to remember being a child. He wants more space to remember good things he's read in books.

He takes Jim’s clippers, and then Jim. He asks Jim to make him look like all the rest of the guys out there in the field.

“Why?” Jim asks, that appreciative curiosity comforting on his face.

Toro smiles in the mirror in spite of the dark circles under his eyes. “‘Cause I am like all the rest,” he says.

 

+

 

He finds Bucky on the edge of town just as Bucky has slowed down to wait for an approaching French girl. She has spotted him spotting her, and is cautiously making her way from the nearby creek with drying laundry. She balances it on her hip and, hair tied up out of her broad, beautiful face, gracefully manages her burden. 

Bucky turns at the sound of boots scratching on the pebbles. He straightens himself at the sight of Toro and stares at him, tanned face unsmiling in the sun, alert.

He stares and stares, until the girl comes and Toro is tilting his head toward her.

“Bonjour.” Bucky grins in recompense for his flat pronunciation.

“Bonjour,” says the girl guardedly. She looks from him to Toro.

Toro smiles. “Parle-vous -- “

“Yes, English. Yes,” she says, clipped through the accent, still wary. “What is it?”

“Oh, nothing,” Toro quickly says, and then slows down. “We’re just exploring. We have one day here in Grasse.”

“Exploring,” she confirms.

“Yeah, we’re rolling out any time now,” Bucky supplies. “We’re American.”

“Soldiers,” she says.

“Of course.”

“Of course,” she echoes. “There’s no one left in Europe but soldiers.”

She wanders past them. The scent of soap and clean white follows her.

 

+

 

They have the tea eventually.

They pose for a couple photos first, Toro with his new crew cut and Bucky with all his charm and military-bred strength, auxiliary to Jim and Steve’s super-stardom. They get debriefed, first sign that their furlough is on its way out. Then they drink tea. As feared, tea isn’t strong enough.

They buy a bottle of whiskey from the local black market.

Darkness begins to fall; a scent of home-cooked meals catches on the wind from so many houses blessedly intact in spite of the whirlwind Toro and Bucky have been chasing through Europe. They don't think of France as a stepping stone to Germany right now. They pretend it's just a gift, as simple and generous as dusk’s shroud that permits them to sit out on the grass behind their borrowed manor, listening to the chattering creek and the birds telling stories before bed.

“It’s unfair,” Toro says fervently. He passes the bottle to Bucky after taking a ginger few sips of their drink. “We hafta be soldiers, ‘cause we hafta stop this, here. Doesn’t mean we don’t gripe about it, too. Doesn’t mean we’re war-mongers.”

Bucky drinks steadily from the bottle. It’s amazing how he doesn’t grimace, only glances over at Toro’s face, his hair, and back to Toro’s face. Like nothing stings.

Toro bites his lips. “It’s rugged, I’ll say. She musta seen -- golly, what, I don’t know. Musta seen some things even we haven’t. But I can’t take being pegged as a weapon.” 

He gives up, falls back on the grass after finally getting another chance at the whiskey.

“I’m more than a soldier,” he tells himself. 

Bucky collapses back by his side, blank-faced, no contrition.

“I’m not,” he says.

 

+

 

When the alcohol gets to their heads, Toro hallucinates peace. He hallucinates peace enough to judge their environment secure.

He sneaks out his harmonica with a cabalistic smile and puffs a few tuneless times into it until Bucky snatches it away from him and hoots.

“Pipe down,” Toro hisses, grabbing for it and faltering when Bucky springs to his feet and dances away through the trees.

Toro scrambles after him, grabbing at the grass and dirt when he stumbles until he throws himself into a sprint. Free. He bounds, he loses burdens, he glides.

Air. That’s not Bucky’s to claim. That’s always been Toro’s terrain, the unfettered falling that he, the smoke, defies. 

Bucky thuds hard and combative across the wilderness’ lawn, stamping out his message against his unyielding ground -- stronger, bigger.

But Toro is quicker. He whips in, catches up to Bucky. They collide like they always do. He tackles him and the force of their fall tosses them into a tumble through some weeds, over a patch of what smells, squashed on Toro’s uniform, like blueberries.

Unwinding himself, Toro squirms off the ground and onto his feet. “Ha!” he cries, brandishing his harmonica. “Got your boots on, Buck? My win!”

Bucky pulls himself to his feet, squinting. “Says you. Best two out of three.”

It takes two heartbeats to comprehend. Bucky smiles. 

Then Toro curses and bolts back up the way, trying to breathe, fettered by laughter. He hears Bucky thundering up behind him and runs for his life, squeezes the harmonica until he’s sure he’ll break something. He careens toward the creek for salvation.

He reaches it. He skids to a stop.

Bucky trips up behind him, smacking his shoulder, “Tag!” He stops and wobbles.

They peer beyond the brisk waters of the creek.

“Should we go?” Toro asks, quiet.

It takes Bucky a couple bewildered seconds to adjust, watching the gaping maw of darkness across the water. Then he recoils.

The mouth of a cave.

Just a few steps past the creek, and they would be swallowed up by the yawning blackness.

Bucky sounds breathless, though he isn’t. “Nope,” he says with certainty. “Stupid thinking.”

“Did you see this before?”

“No,” Bucky says, and is agonized to admit it. “So if you’re gonna pull any meaning outta this, any dumb ol’ superstitions you wanna bust out now, take my dream as a warning against this joint. Let’s scram.”

Bucky moves toward it, unafraid for himself, and makes a buffer of himself between the cave and Toro. Toro tears his gaze away and looks at Bucky. He finds, even in the near-night, the circles under Bucky’s eyes that look like his own.

“Buck,” Toro begins, before he knows what he wants to say.

“Move out,” Bucky orders.

They leave the cave behind. Afterward, thinking on it, Bucky reasons that it looked nothing like Plato’s Cave, and hence looked nothing like the cave in his dreams. The water runs softly here. Everything under its surface is perceptible, even with only the moon’s illumination. The rocks are only smooth skipping stones.

Toro bends down to pick one up and slips on the unseen pebbles as they clear the bank area. He lands hard on his ass, yelping and then cringing, coughing out something between a laugh and a groan.

Bucky freezes, then drops down beside him. “What the frig, Toro!”

“Ow,” Toro explains through a few huffing laughs, and Bucky’s face falls. “Hold on. Just hold on.”

“Holding,” Bucky grunts. He crouches close, watchful. 

Toro clasps his hands over his tailbone. “Ow,” he breathes, clenching his teeth and whistling through them.

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, sounding relieved. “That’s an ow.”

Toro scrunches his face up. “Don’t you dare drag me back home.”

“Home,” Bucky marvels. “Home, huh?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Nah, I wouldn’t even try.” He stretches his arms wide and locks his fingers over his head. “I’m on furlough.”

“You’re a pal, pal,” Toro mutters. He lies back with a wince, feeling the blossoming of a future bruise, the small gnawing ache of a child’s scrapes and near-misses. Rookie mistake. It feels silly as it must look. So Toro commits to his dumb move. He keeps stretched out over the sloping grass as the pain passes, with the trees and the stars a dome above his head.

Bucky reaches over, crosses his legs, and begins playing Toro’s harmonica.

He plays every song he knows, and then he improvises, and then lies next to Toro and improvises some more. They don’t move until they’re sure nothing will happen to the other.

 

+

 

There was this horrible dream. One died, the other lived.

Toro had always been an optimist. He had trusted they would both die.

War stories sound banal because things in war will happen as simply as in a dream. And no one would know but the beholder exactly the way the sunlight sputtered out when the black of dirt and human debris undulated in explosion, nor the way blood and severed fingers, undone scalps, looked when the rain or hail was transforming it into an unearthly color.

Here is a war story: Bucky lost a boot on his way up into the sky. It fell the moment he burst through the blue. He sailed over the final jut of land. He struck a fast-shrinking image overtaken by a brilliant sky.

Gone.

Steve left with him. He grabbed onto the plane and the engines roared sphinx riddles back to the world. He followed his partner and perhaps they fell together. Perhaps Bucky never let go.

But shackled to the airplane, Bucky left his firm, green earth so swiftly there was no room to wonder. No one thought to act or react as it happened.

It happened.

Gone.

Time snapped into another epoch.

The boot became an antique.

 

+

 

“We can’t leave him out there,” Jim implores the staff of the airbase, edging on frantic. 

Do you see? There’s a heart fastened firmly in there. Knew it all along. “I know him, General! We all know Captain America. This alone won't defeat him, do you hear me? He needs our help!” Jim looks to Toro, touching his shoulder as if to wake him. Jim tries his best.

They shouldn’t have separated. Italy could have waited for Jim, Toro, and Namor. They have a system, the Invaders, a way of finding security in the most hopeless of spheres. What they have is worth so much more than the artillery.

Security is what they have until one leaves the other.

The general explains the ramifications of the distance between enemy ships and their remaining targets. He explains time’s assault on Steve and Bucky’s chances. Namor seethes over naval mines. They talk about all the risks.

Into one minute of stunned silence, vision returns. Toro sees in a tunnel but his limbs remember how to move. Before they can give out, he uses them.

He dashes outside the base, where the Airacobras and Hellcats are zipping overhead. Somewhere down the manicured grounds, Mustangs are taking off. Operations proceed; the sun shines overhead.

Toro runs away, bare feet on the grass, the mud, and steps off the world and alights, burning and careening out toward the sea.

He hardly bypasses the beach barricades when Jim sails into him, grabbing him and grappling him down to earth. He’s shouting. Jim knows, Jim understands, but Jim is accepting what he understands.

Toro fights like a wounded animal, clawing and hitting and cursing. He feels Jim taut and stilted in his joints, in his decisions, when he carries Toro back inside and lets him pound away with his futile, useless fists. Jim doesn’t know what to do. He cradles Toro and carries him into the tidy military quarters and sets him down but doesn’t let him loose. 

“Tom,” he says. His voice breaks. “Tom.”

He just lets Toro collide and shout and try, and try, to run away. Then he lets Toro crumple and breathe, harsh and unsteady.

There’s your lesson, Toro could say. ‘Human’ is so much worse than compulsion. It is so many more worse things than that.

 

+

 

There are love stories at any time. Even when there shouldn’t be. Even when no one would think to call them love stories.

Maybe this one is just a footnote.

Toro finally gets to his feet, dusting himself off and then touching at his tailbone. He untucks his disheveled shirt and dips down the waistband of his trousers just enough. “Am I gonna make it?”

“That’s gonna be every color of bruise tomorrow,” Bucky reports.

Toro turns around. “Harmonica?” He holds out his hand.

Bucky studies the harmonica. “Kinda suits me, don’tcha think?”

“The same way a kick to your shins does, sure.”

Bucky smiles his big, cinematic smile, and presses it into Toro’s hand. “Your compensation prize, Monsieur.”

“Merci,” Toro answers, thinking about the girl and how her nose looked like Bucky’s.

He turns on his heel again. He knows just where to look -- that cave, the black of pitch inside it. He blinks a few times. “Imagine what’s in there.”

“Nope.”

“So many things. They’re things I can think of; who’s to say there’s not a year or more of things I can’t -- “

Bucky takes Toro’s face in his hands. He turns him back around to face him. “It’s bushwa. Forget it, Toro.”

“You sound like me,” Toro says with burgeoning pride.

“Swell. I’m being serious, here.”

“They’re dreams, is all, Buck.”

“I really hate dreams,” Bucky says. 

He looks like a child.

“Listen to you,” Toro says, before he can think of what to say next.

Bucky stares in defiance before muttering, “Yeah.” He ducks his head.

“It’s okay,” Toro tells him, voice gone soft from proximity. In a moment of shining bravery, he mimics Bucky, framing his hands against Bucky’s strong jaw, and just over the ear where hair brushes at his fingers. It gains him Bucky’s attention. “We all got our Achilles’ heels. Y’know? I mean, I still believe in ghosts. All applesauce, and I can’t help it.”

Bucky’s teeth glint in a smile before his mouth closes.

“That’s your ‘stupid practical joke idea’ smile, isn’t it.”

“Hey, before you get the jump on me.”

“Don’t you forget you’re the bully here.”

“Yeah, so -- forget it,” Bucky interrupts himself.

“What do I forget?”

“The dumb stuff.”

“You?”

Bucky chews on his tongue, bristling. “Don’t go running off if I can’t go, too.”

“Well,” Toro teases out, though he wouldn’t. That’s not him. Risk isn’t in him the way it courses through Bucky. Rebellion gives him a stomach ache. What he wants is this.

“Okay?”

Toro rolls his eyes skyward, joking. But Bucky, he searches his face with a hidden ferocity, needing sincerity. 

“Promise,” Toro tells him.

Proximity warms against them. Bucky looks abashed at himself, suddenly. “Seal it with a kiss?” he laughs.

Toro looks at him.

“Your eyes are gray, huh,” Bucky babbles. “Didn’t know that was an option. That’s almost as screwy as your haircut.”

Toro pulls Bucky in and kisses him. 

Bucky forgets words.

Nighttime grass. Birds settling to sleep. Impossible dark. In a few hours, they’ll use it all, build a walkway through Europe’s cracking interior.

That’s what will happen soon, but not before they cheat all that’s waiting to harm and terrify when Bucky stops him pulling away and kisses him again.

With certainty. Certainty is they will both die, but not now. Certainty is relief that this happened. 

Certainty is that anything more, and this heart would be too much to bear. That’s why they tell themselves they will forget this.

 

+

 

Certainty ends when Bucky leaves, alone. Toro wants to go with him. Instead, he learns to stop sobbing hours after Jim has trapped him back on solid ground. He learns to follow the motions; he keeps pace with Jim and Namor, tapping out the right signals and listening at the stations for when to initiate, to fight, to rage. 

The thing is, weeks in, he’ll be relacing his combat boots, or opening a K-ration, or starting surveillance in friendly cities with welcoming citizens, and the tears begin to fall before he remembers again. Salt on his tongue before he can hide his eyes. Seawater. 

He’ll make it, of course. The war’s end is in sight. And there is nothing across the Atlantic that will remember who he's been, and why.

So just leave this heart behind, please. This heart is unendurable.


End file.
